Today I took up a section of my kitchen floor. Partially to find out how hard it would be (short answer= HARD), partially because I wanted to feel like I was making progress, since all this planning with no action has finally gotten to me, and partially because I was just bored. Note – bored Jill is dangerous, destructive impulses appear and get followed instead of ignored. Anyway, I’m calling this an excavation because I got to see the history of the floor in all the different layers of linoleum.

I decided to start in the corner where the table is – it’s a place I hardly ever walk, and there aren’t any cabinets to work around. I began by just taking up the current layer of sheet vinyl – it’s actually not even glued, just held down with the shoe molding, which is easy to pry off. This revealed a layer of luan plywood, stapled every five or six inches.

To get a first look at what I’d be facing, I took my circular saw and made a cut about 6 inches from the wall, just to give myself a small section to attack. I set the blade depth to less than 1/2 an inch, which eventually turned out to not be enough, but it got me to the first few layers. With my cut made, I wedged my crowbar in and pried up the first layer of luan. Luckily, the wood is weak enough that whatever staples didn’t pry straight up with the wood just pulled through. I managed to pry up a full sheet of the luan pretty easily, once I figured out where the edges were.

The wood removed, the third layer of floor was revealed, an off-white sheet vinyl with a faint grid and dots at each intersection.

The off-white vinyl was immediately atop another layer of linoleum, this one dark red and very patterned. I’m trying to imagine how dark the kitchen must have seemed with this floor and all the wood paneling.

Both those layers came up really easily, so I turned my attention to the next layer – another sheet of luan, this one nailed rather than stapled. I had to cut again with my circular saw, since my initial cut only got me through the first layer of luan and a tiny bit into the second one – but I had to be careful to not cut too far, since there’s a wood floor at the bottom that I’m still hoping to restore. As I quickly discovered, this layer was nailed with those ridged nails that are REALLY HARD to pry up. I ended up mostly prying the wood up around the nails, then going back to take out the nails. Also, the staples that had pulled through the previous wood layer were still in the floor, and some of them had penetrated all the way through this layer, so they helped hold it down. About a half hour of trial and error got me a small chunk pried up, and my first view of the linoleum below: red! Very red. Wow.

Once I’d figured out a fairly effective method for prying up the wood layer, I spent another hour battling it, and stopped when I reached an edge. The two wood layers are laid opposite directions, which makes sense, but is also pretty frustrating. But as I removed more of the wood, I discovered a surprise: the red wasn’t the main floor color. The red was an edging for a somewhat greenish marbly colored floor. It’s… remarkable.

I only pulled up a very small section of the red edging, because I discovered underneath it: wood floor. Covered in black adhesive. The green floor with the red edging has no adhesive on top of it, since the luan was nailed down, so it’s an okay surface to leave for a while, whereas I don’t want the cats walking on ancient adhesive and spreading it around the house. I figure I’ll excavate down to that layer over the next few weeks, and then deal with the final layer and the adhesive all at once at the point I make the kitchen off-limits to the cats. We’ll see how that works out.